The present invention relates to a unified host application & associated methodology of integrating local service of a multi-function printer.
It should also be noted that the “background” description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the invention. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description which may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly or impliedly admitted as prior art against the present invention.
Conventionally, when a user wanted to install a new service on a multi-function printer (“MFP”) such as a file storage application, a new application had to be installed to the MFP that made these services available, as shown in FIG. 1.
For example, Document Mall(™) is an application for creating a secure online document storage, enabling an online shared workspace. Document Mall(™) combines security with web-based document management and collaboration features delivered as an on-demand, document management and document imaging service.
Likewise, eCabinet(™) is a network document repository that integrates with multi-function printers. eCabinet(™) provides users with the ability to capture documents and automatically index them, providing archive security coupled with fast retrieval.
In order to leverage these applications in an MFP context, the applications are installed by a service person that would travel to the physical site of the multi-function printer and install the applications manually.
For typical MFPs, various limitations only allow a limited number of applications to be installed. Thus, as shown in FIG. 22, a typical MFP 400 only has three applications 401a . . . c installed at an application layer 402. These applications found on the application layer 402 access the hardware 404 of the MFP through an Operation System 403.
One problem the present inventors recognized is that each application had to be rewritten for the specific hardware of the MFP on which the applications were to be installed. For example, different models of MFPs required different programming code in order to implement the Document Mall(™) application due to differences in the MFP model's hardware.